Possessed said:
Handman said:
moviefreakedmind said:
I’ve never understood the rationale behind going overboard with audio/video equipment. I get spending a ton of money on a TV and speakers, but I don’t get spending hundreds on a blu-ray player or a thousand dollars on a turntable stylus.
Video and audio encoding varies from player to player.
No. Unless you meant “decoding”, and even then I’m doubtful unless the settings are just messed up on it.
In theory, you’re right. Taking bits on a disc and turning them into bits on a wire should be the same for all players. It should be a deterministic process, where input A always leads to output B. And for my part, what I like about Oppo has nothing to do with that, it’s more about other features (regions, outputs, projector support), so I’d buy the Oppo whether that was true or not.
But people who care more about this sort of thing than me have found not all players are the same in processing bits from the disc. First off, the video processors in many players apply some image cleanup routines automatically and in a way that can’t be turned off. Things like DNR, sharpening, etc. While it may create the appearance of a cleaner, crisper image for most consumers, the image displayed after processing does not match what’s on the disc bit-for-bit. Sharpening and DNR is fine for those who like it, but IMO it should be controlled at the endpoint, not introduced at the source, and certainly not in a way that can’t be disabled. Also, there are some colorspace conversions that are easy to get wrong without any obvious signs of issues. There was a comparison several years back of various players (I don’t think this was it, but it’s related), and the Oppos were the only ones outputting the correct RGB values. The others were only off by a bit, and probably not a noticeable amount either, but they were demonstrably wrong. And of course there’s your “this DAC is better than that DAC” argument on the audio side, which I think is pretty tedious because most audiophiles don’t want a flat response and therefore it’s completely subjective. So if you’re into this level of nitpickery, there are nits to pick. I’m firmly of the view that a measurable difference is not always a perceptible difference, and measurements can be abused to create the impression of difference where there really isn’t one, but no deviation at all from a reference value is nevertheless a pretty good sign – especially when your average video signal passes through two to three devices which can all alter the signal in a small imperceptible way which could add up to something that is perceptible in the end.
But again, I actually like other things about the player that are a bit more tangible than these minor audio and video differences.